Host Your Own Content
rempel.world
rempel.world
When people write on sites like Medium or Facebook or Twitter, they know exactly what they're getting into, thank you very much. They're not some idiots who get "tricked" into being taken advantage of. They still do it because they DO get something in return. And guess what? Your content is probably worth shit anyway. Just take a look at some of the popular posts on medium. They're just bullshit content and these people would have had no chance at getting that much attention in their life if it wasn't for Medium. I'm not saying Medium is full of bullshit content (although most of them are), even the better quality content is not worth that much. They probably spent a couple of hours writing that, based on what they heard somewhere else. These effortless content should be taken at face value. They're just expressions. Sites like Medium provide a plaza where you can express yourself and get attention, but not all expressions are worth money. In fact most expressions are not worth it.
Do you really want to make money with content? Stop whining about how you can't make money with blogging, just think of blogging as a way to gain attention, and do something that's much more high value with the attention you aggregated, such as writing a book, building some tangible thing, or anything that deserves to be not forgotten. Otherwise your content deserves to be forgotten.
People rarely have any clue what they are getting into. Myself included. Congratulations on having it all worked out.
People use these services for 2 reasons:
* Ease of use (and typically free, unlike Ghost - which the author linked)
* Audience reach
I don't use Medium for my own writing, I guess my goals towards my writing aren't to reach as many as possible, but for many that is one (if not the most, even if subconsciously) important reason to write/create videos/stream/open source software...
Hosting videos or streams is a whole other world, you need actual infrastructure and a lot of bandwidth.
Personally, I just want to make sure my content is hosted at my own expense. I don't want a free service that makes money on top of my content, I want to pay for the services I need to make my content available. So "pay for your own hosting" seems more meaningful than "Self host."
I get more than 3x as much traffic there, and I really enjoy the editing experience so I publish more. Their design is certainly more beautiful than anything I would ever create in the couple hours of spare time I have.
I don't have total control, but it's a trade off I knowingly make. I can still own my own site and redirect the URLs if I so choose.
IMHO that is the most important bit. As long as you have a backup of all the important content (relatively easy with a blog that's mostly text) and own the domain, you can always pack up and leave if the platform you are using goes away or doesn't fit your needs anymore. (Related: I wish more services allowing you to bring your own domain would also allow to setup flexible redirects for old URLs, but I can understand that would be a relatively complex feature)
Because of the risk. A 100MB video file that "goes viral" and gets 5,000,000 downloads in a month would cost approximately $30,000 hosted on S3 (calculated using https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html). I can't afford that. Obviously I could take the content offline if it suddenly blew up, but instead if I put it on Youtube it would cost me nothing (less in fact; they would pay me.)
The web doesn't scale, and that makes it the great centralizer. If publishing ran on peer-to-peer protocols from the beginning popularity would never be an issue.
There is this slight problem about asymmetric bandwidth and ISP-wide NAT, though…
I've been toying around with IPFS lately, but I still haven't figured out how me getting the repo leads to me joining a global network of peers, with data travelling seamlessly between us. I want the latter, just don't know if it's even supported now.
There are some free pinning services (pinning = inform a bot that you would like your content replicated, and then it takes care of it), including at #ipfs on irc.freenode.net, but the network itself doesn't come with such functionality and after I filled an issue on GitHub, it turns out the authors don't think IPFS should do that. Looks to be out of scope for them.
Outside of that, `ipfs add ...` publishes your content's hashes so everybody who knows the hashes can fetch the content from you.
(You also have `ipfs name publish ...` for publishing a website hash to IPNS, which can later be resolved via `ipfs name resolve <peerID>`)
I'd much prefer something like Freenet's automatic replication model. Luckily IPFS allows it, through its own facilities for extensibility -- if we have the will and resources to invest in that functionality.
They do have "flexible" schemes where the bandwidth can increase as demands grow (of course, you pay accordingly), but that's not the default.
(I'm hosted by https://www.gandi.net/)
Maybe at 29 I'm an old curmudgeon now, but right now I'm building a new website + blog for myself, with a simple, typographic layout, 100% static HTML, and as little CSS and JS as I can get away with. Right now a full article (no images) is about 28KB transferred, including a 11KB CSS framework I'll probably cut in half before even minifying it. The assumption now is that >50KB for a page (excluding images) means I've failed.
GP with his 50KB pages would have to get over 20 million views a month in order to use 1TB. Most of us who work in tech can probably afford to upgrade to a larger droplet if that happens.
Hosting your own content isn't free, but it doesn't have to be very expensive, either.
The entire reason that I do it myself though is because my blog is what I use for random technology experiments, so I get some value out of that.
But, let's say that you're distributing a 10MB video with your textual content, and your post does get lots of attention and suddenly you need to transmit 30,000 copies of that video. Let's also say that you decided to use a CDN to host your larger static content, such as videos.
In such a situation, you know how much that 30000 visitors cost you? According to CDN Calculator[0], it will cost you, on the low end, $18 that month, and if you where using Amazon Cloudfront as your CDN, it would cost you $30 that month.
If you're more price sensitive though, you could easily use a Digital Ocean[1] droplet as your sole content source, and in that case it would cost you a whopping $5 that month, as each droplet comes with 1TB of network traffic per month. If that's not enough you could switch to a SoYouStart server[2] for $40 a month, each of which has a monthly bandwidth allowance of 250 Mbps, which is 78.3 TB of bandwidth per month.
So no, you probably don't need to resort to 320x260 video in 16 colors : )
[0] - http://www.cdncalc.com/
Stupid shit... like hosting a video on S3, or really any static website asset on S3.
Let's say I am a photographer and I want to create or share some image galleries. Each image is big, about 10 MB and there may be hundreds of these images (less than 1000). They have a very permissible license, and I want them downloaded and used as wallpapers, for instance. I want the webpage traffic on my site (over flickr) because I want to drum up business and recognition for myself, but I don't want to risk my site going down under hug of death situations. Low cost solutions are ideal because this is a side project.
Is it best to host the main site on a single server (DO droplet) and kick the heavy lifting of image transfer to someone like imgur? What is the cheap and robust solution to this sort of problem?
0.02$/GB which comes out to 20$ per TB and the first TB is included in the price.
As long as you stay away from well-known IaaS platforms, there are plenty of places where you can get bandwidth for less than $10/TB. Lowest I've seen is $1/TB. Having actually used a few hundred TB with them, it's a bit slower but not that bad.
My advice to most these days is still to host your own blog, but if anything to avoid the commoditisation of your words. Medium is great, but it treats your writing like everything else, and can't really leave a lasting impression of you or your brand/personal brand. I think there's value in posting there, but posting on your own platform first, then re-sharing to Medium later. Content is a weird world right now, and blogging has become something of a pain in the ass for most people to self-host, and generally the experience ends up being sub-optimal (kind of like reading this post that's linked) because the person setting it up doesn't know design/typography/whatever.
I think better advice is simply this: who cares where you write, as long as you do it and don't let the platform stop you.
Replace "meme" with "argument" or "advice". As you justly put it in your last sentence.
(I think that's the point of the article, not having read it)
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:TSfwlW...
> Hosting your own content means you have control over it and the reader’s attention. By writing, you are creating value so harness it instead of giving it away for free.
Not to mention that by hosting yourself, you're not subject to "changing at our discretion" terms of service.
Cloudflare's Always Online™ Error 522 Ray ID: 34dc60943d004f26 • 2017-04-11 07:54:20 UTC Connection timed out
best thing to make a performance test is getting the hn crowd on your site ;) "pre production test"
Goes on to say 'And when I say host it yourself, I don’t mean you need to run the server yourself or be a programmer. I mean, host it somewhere where you control the domain, the content, and the experience.'
At least I can point the finger somewhere else https://status.digitalocean.com
I signed up for the GitHub education pack, which provides (among other things) $50 USD in DigitalOcean credit. I spun up one of the $5/month droplets, primarily to use as an IRC bouncer. But, since I now had my own Linux server with a static IP address, I said "Why the heck not?" and bought a domain name for $10.
So now I have an IRC bouncer and a personal blog. (And a Quake 3 server...because I can)
> Hosting your own content means you have control over it and the reader’s attention
goes offline
Also worth noting Medium is putting out feelers to start paying Writers directly for Content. Based on certain terms. It appears to be part of an attempt at a pay-subscription service model / experiment.
So, even in some respects, investing early on in my Medium profile (1.5 years or so) and using it frequently, conveniently, has allowed me to grow into some occasionally big view/read numbers. I know this because Medium has a good stat tracking system, which, as a self-directed Writer, can give perspective on Topics That Interest Me That Also Interest Other People. That's not monetary value, but it's Content-related value I receive at this point.
The more important point would be "Own Your Own Content" which is a different discussion. Middle-men and service providers can have a role. There are reasons for me to pick DistroKid versus pursue a Major Label deal that would probably include 360 provisions for a decade. And along the way they'd own all my content.
Sites are cyclical from my perspective. Platforms come and go. Most simply crumble under the weight of their own success because their great idea of Free sometimes can't turn the corner to Profitability. Sometimes, heh.
yeah, this is how I see it:
Most of the time when you write something, it's because you are either promoting something (directly or indirectly), building a brand (your or your company's) or because it makes you feel good to "spread the word" on something. Whatever the reason, you gain some value out of this.
Platforms provide you with tools and audience so that you can create that value. In return, they want something too. Is this really so bad?
I'm a quite a capable web developer, but I'm not going to host or build my own blog. That time is better spent on actually figuring out what to write (and writing it).
This is exactly correct. It is "Hey potential employer, check out my Medium articles."
Sure you could host it yourself, you will probably pay a monthly fee for this. Also people you are marketing to would most likely go "Oh hey, this guy is Medium, I have been on that site before." Opposed to "Oh this guy is on some blog platform I have never heard of."
It's regrettable that this inflammatory and one-sided language is one of the top-voted comments on this thread right now. Not that the article is doing a whole lot better in this regard, but there really is some need for nuance here. NIH and DIY are not necessarily bad words.
Personally, I believe the federated concept of the web could benefit from some major de-siloization, as could certain content creators and users. In an era where the vast majority of all user-produced content is owned by Facebook and Google, plus some minor players like Medium, at least consider going with a more independent alternative. However, it's also clear this is not a viable option for most people. But at least people should be aware of the trade-offs they're basing their decisions on.
Yes, if you give ownership of your content to a silo, this will make it much easier to attract and keep an audience. At the same time, content creators need to know they're completely at the mercy of changing policies and shifting product focus. Youtubers had to learn this the hard way in recent weeks.
It's not a popular opinion to have on HN, but I want to encourage everyone who wants to put the time and effort in to host their own content. Know what you're getting yourself into and make an informed decision.
I have my own reasons (lesser around monetization) and thus I'm hosting some of the webservice I depend on on my own for some time now. Since I am not very much into sysadmin things, I found https://cloudron.io recently which has served me quite well thus far. Looking forwards to eventually get my email on that as well :-)
Well for one thing, "inherent value" is never what attracts readers/buyers/whoever, marketing is. So putting your content on a platform that makes people more likely to see it is much more in alignment with certain goals. And if you're considering putting articles on Medium, I'm guessing ad revenue is not one of your goals.
That is, your own domain name, website design/branding, etc.
The point is that if you create popular content but host it on Medium (or Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Google Plus, or any other branded content platform), you are giving that platform's brand free promotion, when you could be using that exposure to better promote yourself.
The trade-offs are the cost of professional hosting, ensuring that the platform you choose has enough capacity to handle any traffic spikes, and designing/maintaining a site design that is as readable/usable as the established platforms.
He should have just posted on medium.